Angela J. Rowland

Like most modern instruments, the modern flute is capable of a multitude of timbres because of its construction and the way the performer relates to it.  Throughout history, the sound of the flute has been associated with pastoral life, mythical or spiritual figures, and death.  Composers such as Beethoven, Respighi, Prokofiev, Messiaen, Debussy, and many others have masterfully orchestrated their symphonic music with their unique signature sounds to suggest a particular mood, atmosphere, or location, and used the flute as one means to achieve this end.[1]

The musical score is to the performer as a script is to an actor.  Certain inflections are necessary that cannot be addressed visually in the score, and which can only be contributed by the performer.  The intention behind the written language is of the utmost importance for the performer to interpret and communicate.  The performers' musical interpretation reveals their understanding of the style and the context within the musical score.  The style, form, texture, and harmony contribute to the context of the music.  Subjectively speaking, the conductor is ultimately responsible for the sound of the orchestra with comments from the podium on balance, sound, and interpretation.  In order to do this, the conductor must know the score inside and out.  Erich Leinsdorf expands upon the idea by describing how to acquire this important skill in his book The Composer's Advocate: "One way is to learn what to look for in a score and how to interpret what one finds, through a knowledge of the traditions and the culture milieu in which a composer wrote."[2]  Music is more than mastering a series of techniques; to learn the music one must study the source, the score.  To understand the score, one must understand the context in which it was written.  Archibald Thompson Davison once said, "An ideal performance realizes the composers' intentions."[3]

What do Beethoven, Respighi, Prokofiev, Messiaen, Debussy, He Zhan Hao and Chen Gang have in common?  Although there are obvious stylistic differences due to the passage of time, these composers explore the timbre of the flute to suggest the pastoral setting, and more specifically, birdsongs.  Was it a coincidence that each of the above composers chose the flute to represent the bird?

Beethoven was not the first composer in history to use the flute in a pastoral setting.  Eighteenth-century composers, such as Handel and Haydn, set an historical precedent for the pastoral in their large choral works.  Handel's Messiah, for example, contains a movement titled "Pastoral" in 6/8.  Haydn's The Creation contains one movement (late in the work) that features the flute in the pastoral movement, "The Creation of the Animals."  Beethoven was undoubtedly influenced by these historically important choral/orchestral works and also by the visual arts, where the pastoral was a popular theme. 

Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 6 in F major, op. 68, "Pastoral" (1808)

Beethoven published his Symphony No. 6 (Pastoral) with the disclaimer that it was "more an expression of feeling than painting" (mehr Anusdruck der Empfindung als Mahlerey).  Beethoven's intention was to capture the carefree mood of the countryside.  He composed this symphony while living in rural Heiligenstadt and Baden during his middle compositional period (c. 1803-c. 1815).  He had already started to lose his hearing by this point.  It is natural that Beethoven would write a "Pastoral" Symphony; his love of nature is well documented.  Throughout the course of his life his favorite form of relaxation was taking long walks in the countryside.  The programmatic effects throughout the symphony include imitations of the babbling brook, various birdcalls, and a rustic festival, among others.

The second movement, "Szene am Bach" (Scene by the Brook), is highly pictorial in nature, and ends with a passage incorporating a series of stylized birdcalls.  Beethoven wrote a bird-like passage in the final part of symphony's second movement, which serves as a link between the second and third movements. Beethoven 's nightingale, scored for the flute, is comprised of only two notes scored comfortably in the middle register, G and F.  The falling major second is written with a gradual accelerando, and eventually becomes a trill as the other birds (oboe and clarinet) begin to sing their songs.  Each birdsong suits the respective instruments' characters.  Beethoven identified the birds by name in the score (see musical example 1): the nachtigall (nightingale) enters first, played by the flute, followed by the wachtel (quail), depicted by the oboe, and finally the clarinet joins with its kuckuck (cuckoo).  The three instruments end the birdlike passage together, with the oboe ending one eighth-note before the others.  This shows that Beethoven was suggesting birdsong and created an artificial trio for his musical purposes. 

The flute trill is an established musical cliche for portraying birds in music.  However, it is musically effective because of the context.  The flute solo includes a rhythmic accelerando, starting on a weak-beat eighth note, tied to a strong-beat one.  After adding the upper neighbor tone, the rhythm is then diminished to half its value, with sixteenth-notes for the same two-note motive.  Each voice has four statements of their unique birdcalls; in the passage the nightingale motive begins with the accented sixteenth-note gesture.  The accents imply a change of character.  Furthermore, the trill creates a background of sound for the combined birdsong passage.  (See example 1.)

Example 1.  Beethoven, Symphony No. 6, "Scene by the Brook", mm. 129-132

It was not an arbitrary decision by Beethoven to have these particular woodwind instruments tied to a particular bird species.  Beethoven carefully chose the timbres of the flute, oboe, and clarinet because they are closer to the actual bird sounds than any other instruments in the orchestra.  For example, the nightingale's song is most idiomatic for the flute.  The range lies within a narrow interval in the middle register, where the flute is comfortably resonant and not too bright.  It would not have worked for the quail to be the flute and the nightingale to be the oboe.  Although both parts are within the range of both the flute and oboe, the sound of the flute on D2 is much brighter.  The quail's song lies within the oboe's high register, and is more "reedy" than the flute's sound. Beethoven intentionally identified the birds in his score for the performers to emulate the sounds heard in nature.  However, one should be able to aurally recognize that these are bird songs without necessarily reading it in the score.  Therefore, it becomes apparent that Beethoven included this extra information in his score to help the performers and conductor to imitate sounds heard in nature.

Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936): Pina di Roma (1923-4)

Another highly programmatic orchestral work is Respighi's Roman tone poem The Pines of Rome, written in 1923-4.  The two flutes play an important role in the depiction of nature as happily fluttering nightingales in the first movement, "The Pines of the Villa Borghese".  It is in a tutti section, with lush fountains of arpeggios and trills.

"The Pines of the Janiculum" begins with an impressionistic flute solo that conjures images of filtered light and running water.  The range of the solo in this movement is much wider than in previous movements; Respighi exploits the full range of the instrument. 

Toward the end of the movement, recorded actual birdcalls (included with the rental orchestral parts) are heard, giving the impression the symphony is performed outdoors with the actual birds responding to the music.  Later in the century, composers expanded upon this idea and it evolved into music sampling. 

Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953): Peter and the Wolf, Symphonic Tale for Children, Op. 67 (1936)

Peter and the Wolf is a highly programmatic work in which the narrator introduces the different animals and carefully describes Peter's story. 

The flute portrays a little bird with a great deal of character and personality; typical passages include fast grace notes (chirping), ornaments, short trills, and fast, and slurred repeated arpeggios that end with a flourish.  The flute's first appearance occurs as interjections in a statement of the "Peter" theme in the violins.  The phrase duration is mapped out into four-bar and eight-bar units, typical of Prokofiev's Neo-Classical style.  The rhythm is measured and the series of motifs develop the birdsong.  Prokofiev utilizes the full range of the flute (at that time): C1 to C4. 

The narrator introduces the first flute solo with the text, "A little bird, Peter's friend, sat on the branch of a big tree.  'All is quiet,' chirped the bird."  The flute plays without accompaniment the first time, and with the oboe as accompaniment when the phrase is repeated in the next four measures.  The tempo is very fast, like actual bird song.  One may imagine the bird fluttering its wings and hopping from branch to branch as it sings its song.  (See example 2.)

Example 2.  Prokofiev, Peter and the Wolf, rehearsal 2:

Later, the narrator describes a pastoral interchange, "The duck answered, 'What kind of bird are you if you can't swim?' and dove into the pond."  The flute's rapid arpeggios represent the bird flapping its wings.  The following measure contains a gesture that depicts the little bird's frustration about not being able to swim with the duck.  The switch from F natural to F flat at the end of the gesture suggests this feeling of unrest.  However, the rhythm is measured and the tempo is regular.  (See example 3.) 

Example 3.  Prokofiev, Peter and the Wolf, rehearsal 8:

            After the duck begins to swim, the bird (flute) warns the duck (oboe) that the cat (clarinet) is near.  This is accomplished through frantic upper-register flourishes.  Later in the work, the flute finally gets to play the "Peter theme," only to be answered by the wolf (horns).  The music becomes increasingly intense with the wolf's impending threat to Peter.  Following Peter's victory over the wolf, the bird (flute) happily plays a variation of the triumphant march with eighth-note ascending octave leaps.  In one of the final variations, the flute plays the theme in octave leaps with very fast arpeggios (in septuplets) to underscore the victory against the wolf.

Usually the flute's music consists of a series of motives, comprised of scales, arpeggios, and trills. There are many small solos for the flute sprinkled throughout this work.  Prokofiev's flute solos are extremely effective musically because they add a great deal of character to the story of Peter and the Wolf. 

Olivier Messiaen (1908-92):  Reveil des oiseaux (1953) and Oiseaux exotiques (1955-6)

While it is easy to imagine birds in many orchestral passages written for flute, Messiaen manages to notate the exact birdcall of the nightingale to be played by the flute and piccolo in his Reveil des oiseaux.

Reveil des oiseaux (1953) is based exclusively on birdsongs and depicts the passage of time from midnight through the cacophonous dawn into mid-morning.  Messiaen composed this piece in the countryside of Petrichet, near Grenoble, listening to and notating actual birdsong in the mountains there.  According to Messiaen, the piece includes a chorus of thirty-eight birds, and the flute represents the Garden Warbler.

Example 4.  Messiaen, Reveil des oiseaux: 

            The Garden Warbler solo has a range of just over an octave, and although this fast triplet gesture was probably slowed down from the actual birdsong, it is very characteristic of the ones heard in nature.

Oiseaux exotiques (1955-6), scored for solo piano and a small group of winds and percussion, is based on songs native to birds of the Americas and Asia.  Messiaen composed in blocks of sound, like the light shifting or looking at a sculpture from different angles.

Messiaen wrote volumes on rhythm, melody, color, and ornithology.  In his writings, he included musical and extra musical tips for musicians.  His research on ornithology as a musician created a scientific phenomenon.  "All I know about melody has been taught to me by birds,"[4] he said.  Messiaen's focused interest in the compositional use of birdsongs spans from 1951 to 1960.  He used the same musical language for the blackbird in Le Merle Noir (flute and piano) as he did for Reveil.  He inserted extra values to create irregular rhythmic meters. 

Example 5.  Messiaen, Le Merle Noir: m. 8:

Messiaen incorporates flutter tonguing, extreme dynamics, and several different articulations in order to imitate the actual birdsongs.  In his birdsongs, Messiaen's descriptions of birds were embodied in music.  For example, a lark played by a legatissimo flute, while the nightingale played by the harpsichord.  His volumes of writings about ornithology did not contain notation of birdsongs, only the descriptions.  Messiaen was inspired by birdsong and nature: "note the sounds of nature...one can form a new technique of sound and duration."[5]

Claude Debussy (1862-1918): Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune (1894)

The flute is commonly associated with birds, as in the preceding examples; however, the flute can also portray an unlimited range of characters and emotions, including mythology or even death.  One example of a mythological depiction is the opening flute solo in Debussy's Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune, where the flute portrays the emotion of naive love with pan pipes. 

This is arguably the most famous programmatic flute solo in the orchestral literature, and is inspired by the pastoral poem by Stephane Mallarme, Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune.  This sensuous work evokes a pagan landscape in which the faun, a mythological creature of the forest who is half man, half goat, wakes up in the woods and tries to remember if he was visited by three lovely nymphs or if it was all a dream.

On a sultry afternoon in Sicily a faun awakens from a vivid dream full of desires, whose mood he seeks to preserve through the magical power of music and of recollection.  Gradually his internal passions intensify, and he gives himself up to the uproar of his senses before sinking back into slumber.  What the composer had in mind was, in his own words, less a musical representation of the events described in the poem than a musical evocation of the poem's pervading atmosphere.

Conventional tonal analysis is insufficient to describe Debussy's thinking.  The overall work revolves around a tritone (C#-G). The phrases are in regular four-bar patterns, with a languid line shaping the enchanting melody, which falls in the low to middle range for the flute, from D#1 toC3.

The first three statements of the theme each begin with C#: the first time it is unaccompanied (example 6), the second time it is harmonized with a D major chord (example 7), and the third statement is harmonized over an E major chord (example 8).

It begins with the flute solo alone on C#, the only note on the flute with all the keys in an open position.  It is the most basic and pure sound a flute can produce, and is a highly malleable note in terms of the potential spectrum of color, i.e. character.  (See example 6.)

Example 6.  Debussy, Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune, mm. 1-4:

Even though the meter is in 9/8, the passage feels improvised due to the rhythmic construction.

Example 7.  Debussy, Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune, mm. 11-14: 

Example 8.  Debussy, Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune, mm. 21:

The now-famous ballet that popularized Faun, was choreographed by the Russian dancer Ninjinsky, and was first performed in Paris 1912, with Ninjinsky as the Faun.  Mallarme felt one could almost hear the lightness of the flutes first breath blowing through the forest.

Olivier Messiaen wrote about Debussy's Faun in his sixth volume of Traite de rythme, de couleur, et d'ornithologie:

The music of Debussy adds to Mallarme's idea of enchantment: the enchantment of nature, the enchantment of love, the enchantment of memory, and the enchantment of death. Mallarme described the flute solo as: "devait fatalement tenter le musicien". [6]

In the poem, there are digressions within the opening line that suggest memory, imagination, transformation, and especially a dream.  The Faun asks himself, "Did I love a dream?"  Mallarme emphasized, "The ideal is to suggest the object."  The major structure behind Debussy's musical language was poetry; his music is comprised of the same number of bars as Mallarme's poem has lines.[7]

Messiaen commented in his copy of Mallarme's poem:

C'est par un solo de flute qu'il rend les nymphes immortelles:

"Suffoquant de chaleur, le matin frais s'il lutte,

Ne murmure point d'eau que ne verse ma flute

Au bosquet arrose d'accords; et le seul vent

Hors des deux tuyaux prompt a s'exhaler avant

Qu'il disperse le son dans une pluie aride,

C'est a l'horizon pas remue d'une ride,

Le visible et serein souffle artificiel

De l'inspiration, qui regagne le ciel."

It's the solo flute that makes the nymphs become immortal:

"Choking with heat the fresh morn if it strives,

No water murmurs but what my flute pours

On the chord sprinkled thicket; and the sole wind

Prompt to exhale from my two pipes, before

It scatters the sound in an arid shower,

Is, on the horizon's unwrinkled space,

The visible, serene artificial breath

Of inspiration, which regains the sky."

This poem is full of impressionistic images, including water, wind, and sky.  The flute breathes life into the poetry by translating the poetry with its aural images of watering thickets.  The "two pipes" could refer to the Greek aulos, but Debussy maintains the French perspective of Mallarme by scoring it for the "new" Boehm flute.  There is a direct correlation between the length of the poem and the length of the music.

He Zhan Hao/Chen Gang Butterfly Lovers: Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai (1958)

While European composers were influenced by music of Asia, there was also a musical exchange to bring European music to Asia.  However, this cultural exchange in China is dependent upon the views of the Chinese Government.

Two young composition students at the Shanghai Conservatory blended together elements from both Asia and

European music in their highly successful Butterfly Lovers.  The story is very similar to Tchaikovsky's Romeo and

Juliet.

Almost all of the music in this violin concerto is based on original music used in Yu opera.  The concerto is a programmatic work based on the tragic love story about a young couple, Liang and Zhu.  Written in three sections, love, protest, and transfiguration, it is played as one continuous movement.

The piece begins with a flute solo against a background of soft tremolo in the strings, followed by a beautiful oboe melody, representing a beautiful, sunny day.  The flute represents the dawn with the color and tessitura in the cadenza-like introduction.  The flute material is based on two motives:  octave leaps on D and G, and the D2 trill.  Free rhythm in the flute cadenza differs from the other musical examples.  He and Chen favor the flute's high register.  (See example 9.)

Example 9.  He Zhan Hao and Chen Gang, Butterfly Lovers, m. 4:

The flute and harp begin the recapitulation with similar material as compared to the beginning.  The love theme reappears with a new tone color, the solo violin con sordino.  The tomb symbolically opens, and two butterflies (portrayed by the flute and violin) emerge, representing the transfiguration of the deceased lovers.  At the conclusion of the piece, the flute solo depicts life after death in Butterfly Lovers.  (See example 10.)   

Example 10.  He Zhan Hao and Chen Gang, Butterfly Lovers, m. 713-14:

Although the "life after death" theme departs from the "pastoral" theme, the programmatic aspects of the flute are an important factor in this concerto.  Furthermore, the "butterfly theme" is similar to the way the previous composers used the birdsong.

The composers discussed above address the various musical parameters in the evocations of birds through the flute. While it is easy to imagine birds or aviaries in these works written for flute, Messiaen manages to notate the exact birdcall of the nightingale to be played by the flute.  Over a century earlier, Beethoven wrote a flute bird-like cadenza in his Symphony No. 6.  Beethoven's nightingale is different from Messiaen's because his is comprised of only two notes, G and F, a falling major second that turns into a trill.  Beethoven's bird cadenza is a cliche when compared to Messiaen's literal interpretation of the birdsong.  However, both are effective in their respective musical language.

While Beethoven's birdsong uses a major 2^nd, Respighi and Prokofiev expand the range up to C4.  Messiaen's birdsong is probably the one that is most like the actual birdsong because he was an ornithologist.  This is not to say the other birdsongs do not have a strong musical effect.  Debussy's music, although it is not really a birdsong, is the most expansive in terms of phrase length.  In conclusion, Debussy and the music in Butterfly Lovers represent programmatic aspects of the flute beyond the birdsong.

Works Cited

Baggech, Melody. Translating the Mind of Messiaen. Paper presented at the Couleurs dans le vent: Celebrating the Music of Olivier Messiaen.  University of Kansas Lied Center: Lawrence, Kansas, 09 November 2002.

Baxtresser, Jeanne.  Orchestral Excerpts for Flute with Piano Accompaniment.  Bryn Mawr, PA: Theodore Presser Company, 1995, p. 23-24, 49, 51.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van. Symphony No. 6, "Pastorale", op. 68.  Wiesbaden and Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hartel, 2001, p. 46-47.

Griffiths, Paul.  Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time.  London and Boston: Faber and Faber Limited, 1985, p. 173.

Grout, Donald J. On Historical Authenticity in the Performance of Old Music, in Essays on Music in Honor of Archibald Thompson Davison by His Associates. Cambridge, Mass.: Department of Music, Harvard University, 1957, 161-71.

He Zhan Hao and Chen Gang. Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai: Butterfly Lovers.  Shanghai: Shanghai Music Press, 1999.

Hill, Edward Burlingame. Modern French Music.  1924; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1969, p. 197.

Leinsdorf, Erich. The Composer's Advocate: A Radical Orthodoxy for Musicians.  New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981, 4.

Messiaen, Olivier. Le Merle Noir.  Paris: A. Leduc, 1952.

Messiaen, Olivier. Traite de Rythme, de Couleur, et d'Ornithologie (1949-1992), Tome VI. Alphonse Leduc & Cie, Paris, 2001.